Kick

by Paula Byrne

  10

  Travels with my Mother: Russia and England

  I haven’t seen any beautiful Kennedy faces for seven months – long, long time that.

  Kick Kennedy

  Latvia, May 1936.

  Kick Kennedy and her mother Rose eyed the tiny, old-fashioned plane with suspicion. As it trundled towards them, they got the impression that its fuselage and wings were lashed together by ropes. To her horror, Rose spotted her luggage being wheeled across the tarmac and realized that, indeed, this was their plane.

  During his time in Europe, Joe Jr had toured Russia and had regaled the family with tales that had inspired the intrepid Rose to see it for herself. She asked Kick to accompany her and they flew by commercial jet to Latvia from Paris on the first leg of the journey. Now the small Russian plane would take them on to Moscow. There were only four seats and they were the only passengers. As they strapped themselves in, Rose began reciting Hail Marys silently to herself, thinking of the children she had left behind, whom she was convinced would soon be motherless.

  There was a ‘convulsive shudder’ and the tiny plane was airborne. In the absence of technology, the pilot flew by visual landmarks, tipping the wings so that he could navigate. Rose recalled ‘an endless expanse of dark, dense, impenetrable forest, which for variety was sometimes obscured by fog or low-hovering clouds’. It was a terrifying journey. As the landscape loomed up towards them, the pilot would suddenly pull out the choke and rise, ‘leaving our stomach’s Kick’s and mine, back on the latest cloud’.1

  Suddenly the plane experienced severe turbulence. The pilot, to their shock, after several ‘near misses’, took his eyes off the terrain and gave over the controls to his co-pilot in order to turn around to smile and wave to Kick and Rose. Rose later recalled that ‘After some hours we landed safely. Neither Kick nor I had become airsick. Probably because our normal reflexes were paralysed.’2

  Kick, homesick for her mother, had been looking forward to the trip, writing to Bobby: ‘Mother shall be here in three days and can’t wait to see her. I haven’t seen any beautiful Kennedy faces for seven months – long, long time that.’3 She treated herself to a new smart suit and hat, desperate to show her beloved mother that some Parisian chic had rubbed off on her. They had met at the Ritz. Rose recalled the first moment she saw her daughter: ‘She looked so pretty and sophisticated, but the moment she saw me she dissolved in tears of happiness as if she were still a little girl. I will never forget what I felt when I saw her. I realized so clearly how lucky I was to have this wonderfully effervescent, adorably loving and extremely pretty child as my daughter and friend.’4

  Rose was especially moved by her time with Kick because it reminded her of the time she had travelled with her sister Agnes: ‘Traveling with Kathleen was such a joy.’5 She told Kick all the family news, notably that Jack was ‘completely recovered’.

  Once in Moscow, the American Ambassador William Bullitt, ‘a perfect host’, met them. Kick and her mother saw the Bolshoi Ballet and, when they took the train to Leningrad, the Hermitage. Rose, always an indefatigable tourist, ensured that they saw ‘everything there was to see’ in Moscow and Leningrad. They visited schools, hospitals, churches, Lenin’s tomb in Red Square and the famous Moscow subway ‘where every station is a work of art in marble and mosaic’.6

  Bullitt advised Kick and Rose to exercise caution and discretion when they used the telephone, as the operator was a spy.7 Each time they left the Embassy they were followed by a little car. They soon realized that they were under constant surveillance. Rose, with her usual curiosity and love of history, put numerous questions to the guides but was asked to desist, as the guides were being monitored and could get into trouble if the wrong thing was said.

  Bill Bullitt told Rose and Kick that one day he had taken himself for a long, relaxing swim in the Black Sea. He swam out deeply, then floated on his back admiring the azure sky. He was enjoying the sense of freedom, of not being followed, until he heard gurgling and splashing from another swimmer. He turned to see the familiar face of one of his NKVD followers, who was pretending to look the other way.

  Despite this ominous atmosphere, Rose came to see why Communism was accepted: ‘The masses really were better off in a good many ways than they had been under the Czarist system.’ She spoke to several of the guides who told her that they much preferred the new system and had better lives, education, facilities, childcare and work opportunities, paid for by the state. One attractive guide amazed her by telling her and Kick that people could now read ‘any book in the whole library’ that they wanted to, something the Western world took for granted. Rose and Kick were acutely aware that the libraries were purged of books ‘critical of communism’. Rose was, of course, dismayed by ‘the official doctrine of atheism’.

  The Kennedys always believed that experience was better than classroom knowledge. It was an education for Kick to have been to both Italy and the Soviet Union in 1936 during these critical times. She was falling in love with Europe. Travel was opening the world to her in a new and unexpected way. Rose asked her if she wanted to come back home early, but Kick decided that she preferred to stay and do some more travel in Europe. ‘Well, darling, I miss you and wish you were along,’ Rose wrote from RMS Queen Mary, ‘but I am so glad that you decided to stay. You are a great joy to us both.’8 Rose advised Kick to get lots of work done in her final months at the Convent. Kick, on the contrary, was ready to have some fun.

  She was still determined to attend the Cambridge May Ball with Derek. While her mother headed home on the Queen Mary, she crossed the English Channel with her Noroton friend Ellie Hoguet en route to the university town of Cambridge. They planned to stay for four days and to attend two college balls. She went shopping and bought a beautiful white taffeta evening coat.9

  They were staying in a vicarage in Cambridge in rather humble circumstances, sleeping on the floor on airbeds. ‘None of the rooms had any furniture but a bed.’ Kick said she felt as if she were ‘rolling all night’.10 The next morning, Derek was rowing on the Cam in the ‘Bump’ races, and Kick went along to support him.

  Later, she dressed for the Trinity May Ball. Cambridge in summer is one of the loveliest places on earth and the Trinity Ball a highlight of the academic year. Exams were over, and the ball marked the end of the academic year. Strictly white tie and tails for the boys and long dresses for the girls, the event began at nine and the guests were encouraged to wine, dine and dance until dawn. Then, in the early hours of light, they would gather for a survivors’ photograph, still in their evening wear. Those who were still awake would punt down to Grantchester where breakfast was served in the Orchard tea garden.

  A marquee had been erected on the banks of the Cam, lit with hundreds of lanterns. Kick had dressed carefully in silk chiffon. Derek was her partner for the evening, but many men were captivated by her and asked her to dance. Her friend Ellie was disheartened by the sheer number of Englishmen who fell for her, noting that forty men swarmed around her like bees at a honey pot.11 They were drawn to her openness and warmth and lack of pretension. The dowdy, prim English girls were simply no match for her, and Kick was incredulous at their drabness. ‘There is something wrong with the English Girls,’ she told her mother. ‘Hardly any pretty evening dresses or girls.’ She thought it amusing ‘to be walking around in evening clothes in broad daylight’.12 Her lovely chiffon dress ‘took rather a beating’.

  Kick thought her time at Cambridge was ‘marvelous’. From then she went on to Suffolk with a schoolfriend. She was delighted that there had been no rain in England. Kick was asked if she would go back for another weekend the following year. She was a hit in England – a foretaste of things to come. She was determined to return. She told her mother: ‘Tell Jack that he has to come to Cambridge next year.’13

  Her time at Neuilly was now over and she was to return to Noroton, but it had been the most thrilling success, and her year in Europe had made a deep impression, one that would
never leave her. Eunice Kennedy remarked that for her father experience was the most important thing in life for building character, whereas for her mother it was religion.14 Kick chose experience.

  Kick’s European adventure had given her a certain polish and sophistication, though she was still only sixteen. She had visited the best museums, galleries, churches and buildings of Europe and had acquired a new confidence. She had seen the Pope and Mussolini in Rome, attended the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia and the May Ball in Cambridge. Home in America seemed dull in comparison, though it was always a joy to return to Hyannis Port for the lengthy summer vacation. It had been a very long time since she had seen Jack, who had spent most of 1936 resting and building up his strength. He had been recuperating in Arizona and appeared to be making a good recovery before heading to Harvard in September, after a short stint at Princeton.

  Now that she was older, and had been away for a year, Kick was becoming aware of the strangeness of her parents’ marriage. Rose took solace in her faith. She would go alone to St Xavier’s daily mass and, when she was troubled, take long solitary walks along the beach front. She even had her own little summer house (called ‘the White House’) to retreat to when she wanted to be alone.

  Joe, meanwhile, continued to indulge his sexual appetite. Kick’s friends felt uneasy about her father’s unwanted advances. Some of them refused to watch movies in the basement cinema because he would touch them and pinch them. In the evenings, he would insist on a kiss on the lips.15 Kick’s close friend Charlotte McDonnell was surprised to discover that Kick’s parents led separate lives, and that when they came to New York City they always stayed in separate hotels, Mrs Kennedy at the Plaza, Mr Kennedy at the Waldorf.

  One day, Charlotte went to meet Kick at the Waldorf and mistakenly entered Joe’s suite. He was in the shower and called out that she should leave her coat on the chair and meet Kick and Jack across the hall. He then appeared in just a towel and told the young people: ‘Will Hays came in and saw your coat and turned around and walked away, thinking I had a girl in the bedroom.’ Joe was clearly delighted by this and Jack and Kick thought it delicious that the man in question was responsible for the Hays Code, banning sexual references from Hollywood movies. Charlotte, on the other hand, was shocked. Her own father would never have behaved like this in front of her friends.16

  That summer of 1936, Jack invited more of his ‘surprises’ to Hyannis Port, Cam Newberry, Charles Wilson and Herb Merrick. They all fell in love with Kick, who was the female version of her best brother, bubbly, witty, fun-loving.

  Kick’s American female friends noticed a new ease in the tomboyish, sporty girl and were amazed by her success and popularity. Kick was not a conventional beauty, especially compared to her sisters, but men continued to flock around her. Kick’s girlfriends wondered privately about the secret to her success. Was it her wealth, her clothes, her connections, her warmth? Later on, her many English girlfriends would have the same thoughts and were equally intrigued by her allure.

  Her close friend Nancy came the closest to an explanation when she observed that it was her ‘aloofness’ that set her apart.17 Kick sensed intuitively that men liked a girl who was hard to get. What Nancy was getting at was Kick’s unique ability to be simultaneously warm and cool, friendly but distant, sexy but never promiscuous. Women liked her and rarely felt threatened by her charm, while men adored her and were drawn to her natural sexiness and vivacity. One of Jack’s friends, Tom Egerton, recalled, ‘I think she probably had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met in my life. She wasn’t especially pretty, but she just had this appeal.’18 Another devoted Englishman trying to put his finger on her elusive charm said that she had the most ‘sex appeal of any woman he had ever known. Not because she was beautiful, but because she was so kind.’19

  As the sister of red-blooded brothers and a sexually promiscuous father, she was no innocent, and yet she exuded a kind of purity. She was not a vulnerable or needy girl; she was very happy in her own skin. She had that Kennedy streak of independence and spirit that was extremely appealing to the opposite sex. The more aloofness she exhibited, the more her suitors were drawn to her. Jack had this too.

  One element of this coolness was her Catholic prudery. The strict religious education she had been given taught her that fornication, masturbation and birth control were sins. While in Europe, she had been genuinely alarmed by the voracious Italian men and had also warned her sisters about Frenchmen: ‘Don’t eye the Frenchmen or they will be hot on your trail.’20

  Her extreme self-possession had a darker side: an inability to give fully of herself. This caused her a degree of anguish. Many years later, she confided to a close male friend that she was afraid that she didn’t have it in her to be truly intimate with a man. This prudishness was coupled with an extraordinary warmth and charisma. It was a heady and intoxicating mix.

  It seemed also that Kick was saving herself for someone special, that she had a sense of destiny. She was happy to date American men, but always at a distance.

  11

  Politics and Europe Revisited

  love from a daughter who needs more sense.

  Kick Kennedy

  The stage set looked like a ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ location from a movie about the days of slavery. The bandstand was a replica of a Southern mansion with large white columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters. The band played on the veranda of the mansion. A few steps down led to the dance floor, which was also used for floor-shows. This was the Cotton Club, which in 1936 relocated to new premises in Times Square on Broadway. It was one of the most sophisticated jazz nightclubs, presenting top-rate black performers for an all-white audience. Waiters in red tuxedos served champagne to Manhattan’s caviar-and-martini crowd, along with delicious suppers of venison steak and Chinese chop suey.

  The club had an illicit feel. Rumours abounded about associations with the Mob. It opened at nine for dining and light music, then at midnight the entertainment would begin with the first floorshow. It closed at 3 a.m.

  Sitting at one of the tables, set out in a horseshoe design, was the sixteen-year-old convent girl Kathleen Kennedy with her brother Jack and his friend Lem Billings. Jack had recovered his health, had begun at Harvard. He had lost his virginity to a white prostitute in Harlem for 3 dollars. Like his father, he had acquired a taste for showgirls and waitresses. Jack was making up for lost time. He made no secret of his libertinism. In part, it may well have been a reaction to his mother’s frigidity, her strict piety and emotional coldness, but it was also, given all the health problems he had to endure, a way of feeling alive. Jack Kennedy lived for the moment.

  In the fall of 1936, Kick headed back to ‘the old fire-trap’ of Noroton to finish her Convent education. She was unhappy to be going back and saw Jack and Lem whenever she could. It was like old times, the three of them being together. Jack had promised to take Kick to the Cotton Club. But when Joe discovered that his precious daughter had gone there he was livid.

  It wasn’t only that he disapproved of Kick’s and Jack’s duplicity, but he was also worried about the family’s public image. Joe was back on the campaign train with Roosevelt. In September of that year, his campaign book, I’m for Roosevelt, was published. Joe let his feelings be known and Kick wrote him a contrite letter: ‘love from a daughter who needs more sense’. In October, Joe gave a series of nationally broadcast radio speeches, at his own expense, urging voters to back Roosevelt. He sent Kick a telegram asking her to remember to tune in to his latest broadcast. That month he opened up an account for her at Saks.

  Kick, to her amusement, had heard rumours that Jack’s Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald kept her photograph on his bureau. Jack had met Torby on the Cape by accident, but at Harvard they became firm friends. As with Lem Billings, it was a friendship that lasted all his life. Lem and Torby adored Kick, but she kept them at a distance, treating them as she did her brothers.

  Nineteen-thirty-six wa
s an important year for the Kennedy family for two reasons. The first was Roosevelt’s remarkable landslide victory in the November elections; he won 523 of the 531 electoral votes.1 Joe was delighted. Then the same month, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, made a visit to America and wished to meet with Roosevelt. Pacelli was widely considered to be the second most powerful priest in the world. Two and a half years later he would be crowned Pope Pius XII. Pacelli was accompanied on this trip by Enrico Galeazzi, the man who had so dazzled Kick when she met him in Rome, and who had organized for her party a private audience with the Pope.

  Galeazzi called on Joe at his office in the Rockefeller Plaza, noting the blue carpet, ‘of the same colour as the eyes of this man’. They would become firm friends. Galeazzi said that Joe ‘could be as gentle and kind as a gallant knight or as violent and cross as a general at war’.2

  On a sunny November day, Rose and Joe travelled in a private train with Cardinal Pacelli as he rode to the Hyde Park home of President Roosevelt. Rose felt exalted, thinking herself ‘in the presence of a mortal very close to God’. On the way back, Pacelli stopped at the Kennedys’ Bronxville home to take tea and meet the children. They were finally achieving their dream of becoming one of America’s prominent Catholic families.

  Now that Joe was turning into a powerful political figure, with huge press interest in him and his family, Rose spoke to the children about the importance of humility and ‘public service’. She would tell them that great wealth brought responsibility. And she would (mis)quote from St Luke: ‘To whom much has been given, much will be required.’3

  In January 1937, Joe and the family were invited to the President’s second inauguration, but young Joe and Jack were unable to attend, due to midterm examinations. The children were invited to a private luncheon in the White House ballroom. A month later, Joe was asked to head up a new federal agency, the United States Maritime Commission. It was not the job that he wanted, but he accepted and leased Marwood again, writing to a friend to say how much he was looking forward to ‘nice cool mint juleps and Boston lobster’.4 Joe was biding his time.